One that is jumping to a fresh cycle of innovative design

We are in the middle of it, some of you may not have noticed its impact and change but it is significant on the understanding of innovation, in it’s future design.

Often this era of change is not as well-recognized or being faced up to, as you would expect.

Many companies are still in denial or not wanting to address the significant legacy and change required.

Innovation has gone from being islands of knowledge, developing new products and services exclusive to that one company, then quickly copied by the competitors, into something radically different.

We are moving into innovation activities that are built more on collaborative and co-creation approaches, where cooperation and exchanges are more built around platforms and formed in ecosystems.These ecosystems gather around a concept or transformation that requires this collective approach and require a more radical design and become very unique in the end result .To achieve this innovation has gone digital, pure and simple.

There are significant shifts underway towards digital innovation in R&D and new-product development. They are all becoming digital endeavors. Of course, this shift requires really big changes in strategy, operations, the organization and in each individuals orientation. Executing this shift to digital is central and very complex, as it is involving the whole Enterprise.

Nowhere have I come across such a confirmation, then in the annual BCG report, the one released in January 2018 “The Most Innovative Companies 2018: Innovators Go All In On Digital“. The focus of the report is specifically on the state of digital innovation and what it is taking for companies to refocus their innovation programs around this digital imperative.

BCG rightly is pointing out from their research that digital innovation is just taking over everywhere.

They point out that since 2014, only four types of innovation and that are all related to digital, have grown increasingly in importance in their pursuit by companies. These are big data analytics, the fast adoption of new technologies, mobile products and capabilities and digital design.See the above for the complete list on where innovation is heading, it makes interesting viewing from BCG.

Even though this is a trend for all, there is a growing digital divide. Those that have firmly established a coherent, connected and effective digital innovation program are getting stronger, while those that are lagging are increasingly getting weaker. The ability to possibly catch up might come from exploiting technology platforms but this needs some equally careful thinking through and does not avoid the internal need to change and re-orient to this new digital innovation world. The key lies in opening up, both internally and externally and that is a sea-change of difference for many companies to undergo.

So the need to innovate comes from digital as the source

The importance of big data, the speed of technology adoption, mobile products, digital design, and technology platforms are at the heart of innovation. It will fundamentally change the type of resources innovation requires. Another of the visuals from the BCG report is indicating the huge differences between leading and lagging companies in how they are leveraging digital to help the following aspects of innovation

The whole point for innovation today is digital has altered our understanding. We are seeing blurred boundaries, digital is raising the stakes and fear of missing out, it is upping the speed at which others are competing with new concepts, ideas, and engagement with customers. Traditional methods and approaches to innovation are completely breaking down, hence my total belief we are in the new era of innovation.

We so often hear about a transformational mindset, but we do need one.

We need to short-circuit our innovation development process, we must have as much visibility (and controls) into our value chain, we need to develop a riskier mindset to explore, validate and experiment to bring our products and services to market.

The whole operational process has to reorient away from being internally driven into being externally lead. To re-equip whole organizations is a long transforming journey, the breaking down of siloed thinking to one of being more open-sourced one requires new communicating tools. The encouragement of having open feedback loops, both internally and externally, engaging the customer needs exploiting. The push for constant points of “predictive and actionable insights” needs to be engrained in the collective thinking of all within the company. There are needs to explore the ways of working, collaborating and engaging and that alone is a massive undertaking.

Digital is demanding so much in new processes that need to be more agile, responsive, reflective of new insights at increased speed and fluid in the design of those undertaking the solution to react. This needs significant process redesign and the redesign into small, nimble teams and cross-trained groups who collectively gather around a problem to solve it and then disperse and reform in different shape and form to address the next need. This agility needs the tools of testing, feedback, and adaptation to accelerate the innovation process.

I liked the suggested digital design principles that BCG outlined in their report.

The design needs to be customer-centric, agile, experimental, lean, standard as much as it can be, with simplicity and adaptive as being central to this. They need to focus on operational excellence that has high degree’s of organizational discipline that seeks out continuous improvement and the people are empowered, accountable and encouraged to be cross-functional in expertise, both in digital and business-specific expertise.

They suggest within the digital leader some specific traits, I think this resonates with me for the whole digital design and team environment. It needs breadth of understanding, it stays clear on its purpose and in its vision to undertake jobs that constantly change, be culturally adapt, to embrace the digital world, internally and externally, be highly adaptive and flexible to adjust to relevant and emerging information and learning and lastly be as collaborative as they can be in a dynamic network of collaborators, informers, and doers.

To finish BCG provided this visual to outline the processes and cultures that can govern disruptive and radical innovation projects, as digital innovation transformation is certainly that

The road you take will decide where innovation is heading for you

Do you stay on the innovation pathway in its design, built up over many years or recognize, the ground has shifted to one of digital reliant innovation. So each company needs to decide the road they want to take. BCG suggests one road is the measured and deliberate transformation journey but change is a constant to be increasingly more adaptive or the other is applying a “leapfrog approach” where rapid identification, massive external help to scale-up in-house technology linked to technology platforms where culture becomes a significant place to manage, as you manage the old and the new and where there are real clashes.

It does seem we all need to pursue disruptive and radical innovation designs. It seems we can’t keep hiding behind incremental improvement today, others are racing to get ahead and they see digital innovation as the chance to make this happen. Time is not on anyone’s side, it is how you use it and the wisest are going digital as fast as they can.

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We have this compelling need to have a new cycle of innovation design. A more integrated solution that takes our understanding of innovation and how to manage it, into the realms of ecosystems and platforms in its design and thinking.

I wrote a piece “Jumping to a fresh cycle of innovation design” that stated much of what I saw as any design intent.

” We need to increasingly rely on problem-solving techniques that we generate through greater automated discovery and inquiry, those that emerge from analysis and data mining. So, we seek out greater applied science knowledge we will use it to support and develop practical applications based on technology and innovation. Utilitarian in its principles, seeking real-world use and implementation through a more creative, collaborative environment, leading to more discoveries that distinctly ‘blend’ the lab application with the customer discovery of unmet need. Through a blend of pattern recognition, predictive analytics and exploring cognitive computing we can change much with innovation”

“We have been steadily learning to adapt what we knew inside an organization with what we should increasingly listen to outside it. There has been an increasing emphasis on linking concepts in new and novel products and services, increasingly closer to these customer needs and desires.

We need to consider how big data and analytics, technology and a far more creative thinking needs to be applied collectively but in greater constellations of partners. We need to get far more comfortable with working in ecosystems, managed in platform designs to work more collaboratively.

Innovation management itself must become “fluid” in design, in adaptation so the right approach is to be constantly ‘adaptive’ and put together what is needed to tackle the challenge that needs resolution. A constant redesign to meet the circumstances”

“We need to be highly adaptive in what innovation applications, processes, tools, and frameworks can be grabbed, perhaps from the innovation cloud and formed into the individually designed innovation process, that looks capable of delivering the challenge or idea or can be adjusted as we learn and go”

“What type of innovation intelligence platform can be built so multiple ecosystems can form around it? It needs to be one that is integrated and connected up; in tools, methodologies, frameworks, in solution providers and collaborative clients. One that is achieving that we all are working on common problems with data intelligence, feeding into their decision-making process, evolving the discovery and the needs required through innovation, by what they are “intelligently” learning and exploring.”

We need to leverage technology in significant ways to automate the process and capitalize on the power of data, intelligence, and flexible design, delivered in highly adaptive ways.

In my view I visualize a new integrated innovation engagement platform to be like this shown below. Does it make sense to you? I think it is very feasible but it needs working upon. It is very rich in its content and thinking. Your thoughts?

It does not capture everything but it provides the scope of the undertaking. To deliver on this requires a sizable commitment from an organization wanting to lead in building an innovation ecosystem design, that brings innovation up to date, in a connected process and far more fit for purpose? I’d love to engage on this to realize its potential.

The real need is delivering a new integrated innovation engagement platform

Without a doubt, digital and physical do operate at really very different speeds. We need not only a new innovation management system, we need a modern engagement platform.

The growing pressure will be demanded to find solutions that provide a cohesive and business-focused approach to the new social enterprise, one where we seek engagement at scale into multiple arrays of communities and advocates that has data and innovation as their operating core.

I had written in a piece “Connecting Innovation is the New Order of Play” we need to apply five aspects in a new innovation roadmap, one that is required to be built on connecting and collaborating continuously:

1. Exploring innovation through more facilitated conversations and investigation, designing pathways, roadmaps, blueprints and recognizing pattern recognition. These are encouraging us all to have more expeditions of discovery. We must constantly explore the evolutionary perspective in the face of an unknown and uncertain future, to find the ’emergent properties’ to learn quickly from, so we design and build them in a more constant beta mode of validation.
2. Structuring for Asset Orchestration. This is built on the intent that you must orchestrate the capabilities constantly, to purposefully build what is needed to deliver the result and then rebuild them specifically for the next requirement or solution need, in a new learning environment. To manage and orchestrate means to lead, to frame, conduct, direct and set the tempo, that is constantly changing and for that we need to be far more adaptive and fluid in our asset deployment.
3. Aligning People, Technology, and Innovation in Design-always and each time. It is the power of combination. While experimentation speeds the time to a viable business innovation, it does not necessarily lead immediately to the kind of large-scale growth or increased market share that are usually the barometers of performance, in the core business or in any future business potential. It is the “combination effect” that is evolving at increasing speed and complexity for connecting the parts up in a full innovation engagement platform. It is constantly adapting to the needs of the project, not to the system.
4. Impact and Intensity become the new mantra. We need to be more agile, iterative, to be encouraged to be extracting, experimenting and exploring. Our world is shifting from scalable efficiency to scalable learning. Execution and Value Delivery needs to drive the whole innovation process, learning as we go and leveraging this across our network and relationships to provide insights and new knowledge.
5. Exploring and Aligning. Here we are seeing a new management model seeking increasing ‘fusion’ but still wanting to maintain degree’s of separation, we are seeking out ‘flows’ through new knowledge to break down barriers that restrict new insights so as to turn these into new value creation, and we are encouraged to seek out and establish a higher ‘fluidity’ in what we do and reduce the rigidity we presently have in place in our current organizations.We need to operate in ‘dual minds’ and structures is at last constantly striving for the innovation balance: between exploring and exploiting.

It is until we recognize that a large part of our present innovation struggle, to date, is that innovation remains hard to manage consistently well, in a repeating fashion We still strive to systematize it and then attempt to replicate any success we have, so as to achieve more, to repeat and extract efficiencies, yet more often than not we fail. Why is that?

Plain and simply, each innovation is unique, it demands different more flexible thinking. Rigidity needs to give way to flexibility.  To deal with the new innovation era we need to rework our existing models and ideas and replace them with a new innovation understanding each time to extract the uniqueness out of them.

We need to build innovation in different thinking: innovation ecosystem thinking.

My third piece, published in the last few days, “Mapping our Innovation Future through Ecosystem and Platform Design”  outlined the issues we need to address and overcome in any design.

We have today built-in too many constraints. They are holding us back. Boards and Senior Management have a lack of time, as they are often too busy, focusing on the day-to-day they have precious little time to think about the future. They remain extremely nervous when they do not have clear lines of insight to make what they see as riskier decisions. Finally, they are struggling with their present organizational design to adjust and adapt to the changing external world, full of uncertainties. To dither, to put decisions off, to seek out more certainty is not a position of any strength, it is the catalyst to eventual destruction. We need to face these inbuilt constraints.We need to change our mindsets.

It is finding uniqueness that becomes increasingly important and comes from new knowledge, innovation investigation, validation, and outcomes and delivered in business ecosystems that offer new customer value, it builds greater value into capital. It is the amount of capital you invest that drives the potential and today, we are increasingly finding that Ecosystems and Platforms, formed around ideas that are often too complex to be developed by a single entity, are benefiting through collaborative endeavours.

I finished with this: Ecosystem thinking can have a very transforming effect.

A suggested design for a new innovation approach

So I have provided a concept v1 of how I visualize innovation to work. It operates in its own ecosystem of design, it works through the platform, as the enabler and facilitation mechanism. You build your innovation process from all the tools and apps, applicable software that is available and evolving. You seek out collaboration and you look to co-create with necessary partners who share in your mission and can contribute their part of the value-add. You engage across all your community of partners and customers alike, constantly.

All the time through technology, experimentation, prototyping, and testing, you are in constant dialogue and co-creation with the end user, your clients or your customers. As you move towards solutions that meet their known needs or help you to “reveal” the unknowns that come out of understanding new value propositions from the ‘data and insights’ flowing in.

This requires partners working in the ecosystem, reliant on a common platform and environment where you can draw in the necessary tools, apps, and understanding from data and your analytics.

There is no question in my mind, innovation needs to be seen as an ecosystem of design. Does this make sense to you?

**This is a downloadable PDF of the above New Integrated Innovation Engagement Platform

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